Forum Thread Reader , Gadget Beta

Adam , could you try out the attached , text is a bit messed up but its mostly there.

Everybody else is free to give it a go if they wish, But beaware its Beta and strange things could happen.

Hey its a good start!

The layout is a bit squiffy on my screen see below:



Would be good to choose how many posts you want it to preview so if you want it right down the side of your screen you could do.

Now your asking, the size of the gadget is preset with this code

#gadget {
width: 130px;
height: 260px;
position: absolute;
top: 5px;
left: 5px;
overflow: hidden;
margin: 0px;
padding: 0px;
}

would need to find a simple way of changing the height on the fly

if you change the extension on the gadget file to .zip you can extract and you'll see how it all works, the guts is all in an activeX control, everything else is controlled by an html file, except the xml file which defines the gadget itself.

Ooh had a look at the files but its all a bit beyond me! lol

That's cool, Its the only way i can judge people's knowledge.

I can understand what its saying on certain parts, just some parts I don't! LOL

Nice job - is there anyway you can make the background a toggle-able option, perhaps on or transparent / solid colour only it takes away the contrast of the text (at least for me). I think the post text font is slightly too small (with cleartype on it seems to be less clear ironically) and some posts have a linebreak between the title and the text, others do not - you could enforce this by checking the first char of the post and if its not a crlb, add one in there?

I was going to make the changes myself to see how they went however I lack the tools to dissassemble the ocx at work

Good idea on the background, working on having a an options screen just for that sort of thing.
Getting the balance between the gadget size and text and useablity is a fine balance
On my current i've got it reformating the text nicely as i also need to clear out any BB code.

I'll postin up a newer version up fairly soon.